| It’s rare that a coming-of-age novel doesn’t fall prey to cloying characters and pat moralizing. Somehow, Zoe Whittall has managed to avoid both with her new novel Bottle Rocket Hearts (Cormorant Books, 200 pp.), a short, snappy tale of youth slumming, first love and its nasty symptoms.
Alternately poppy, absorbing and subversive – Whittall pulls some surprising punches here – Bottle Rocket Hearts follows young Eve, living and working in downtown Montreal with her friends Seven and Rachel. Somewhere in the middle is her older girlfriend Della, whose alternately tough and needy persona questions Eve’s notions of life, love and sexual politics.
Fast Forward asks Whittall what inspired her tale of being young and queer in Montreal, and the benefits of dealing with a smaller press.
Fast Forward: How was the process of getting Bottle Rocket Hearts, your first novel, published? Are there any benefits when dealing with a smaller press?
Zoe Whittall: This was the first book I sold through my agent, who has been a godsend. Cormorant is a mid-sized press, but much bigger than the presses I've published my poetry with. I think there are good things about both – with a smaller press, you get the bonus of the small-press community supporting your book. With a bigger one, you get an advance and the benefit of people working on your book who actually get paid and aren't just fitting in the edits after their day-job days end. With a mid-sized press, you get the best of both worlds – people who are passionate about literature but have the time to really care about your book.
How much of the novel reflects your own life? What inspired you to write it, and do you see it as a coming-of-age tale?
I'm queer and from a small town and moved to Montreal the same time Eve did. But that's pretty much where the similarities end. There's a bit of me in each character – there was a great opportunity for self-parody in the character of Rachel as a struggling writer – and I did have a similar coming-of-age by discovering the queer communities in Montreal, but I wasn't as naive as Eve, and I didn't meet anyone nearly as dysfunctional as Della. Or, at least, I didn't stick around them for very long. I do see it as a coming-of-age novel, but not one that sticks to one narrative revelation, and not one that focuses on a girl discovering her sexuality or something like that. It's not a coming out novel, even though Eve comes out. I like to think that it evokes the complexities of a certain cultural moment in queer and Montreal history through the eyes of a few oddball kids trying to raise themselves.
The book is set during the 1995 Quebec Referendum. There are also other details in the book that set it in that time (music, etc.). What was it about that period of time and place that attracted you?
In queer history, it was a real end and beginning of particular eras – the panic over AIDS was starting to subside, the community had really rallied together to save itself, people were starting to live longer and the constant grieving was beginning to subside. It was right before we started seeing queer characters on TV, and activists were being allowed into high schools to speak about coming out. There were support groups for teenagers. It was a vibrant time where we were starting to see the positive outcome to years of fighting by activists in the ’80s. Feminism was entrenched in this extreme form of identity politics.
In Quebec history, it was also a crazy time – Montreal was economically depressed and the separatist movement was strong. Now it's really faded, but at the time there was a fever for change. The Anglophones were scared. There was a lot of passion in the air, especially for activists and students. It was an exciting time.
I felt that in a lot of works, Della would be praised as some sort of hunger-artist-as-hero character, but you don't do that. What inspired her character and the others in the book? Also, are there stereotypes in queer fiction that you find limiting/annoying?
Yes, I really didn't want to have the self-loathing queer character whine about his or her life. I didn't want the poverty-glamorizing artist, Della, to be worshipped by Eve for the entire novel. I hoped that everyone, despite their gender or subculture stereotypes, would come across as complex and believable.
Do you think that writers are expected to follow familiar tropes within queer lit?
I don't know. I think there isn't enough queer lit out there, especially in Canada. I wish we were overwhelmed by familiar narratives. There are a lot of queer writers in Canada but few who write about queer characters with any kind of regularity. |
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